Study sees good news in heart treatment

Increased use of angioplasty and the introduction of new drugs over the last six years have nearly halved the number of hospitalized heart attack victims who die or suffer severe heart failure, an international team of researchers reports Wednesday.

"There have been a lot of lives saved, a lot of complications averted," said Dr. Joel Gore of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, one of the study's leaders.

The group could not attribute the improved outcomes to any one treatment or medication, concluding it was the total of all combined that was responsible.

The report showed "remarkable improvements" in the care of heart attack victims in all 14 countries studied, said Dr. Gregg Fonarow, a UCLA cardiology specialist, who was not involved in the study.

"It is not simple to manage these patients. Many therapies need to be applied very rapidly," Fonarow said. This study shows that individual drugs and treatments that have been validated in clinical trials can be combined in the real world to produce "meaningful benefits."

Added Dr. Keith Fox of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, who led the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association: "Our study supports the fact that hospitals are using new treatments effectively."

For every 1,000 patients admitted to hospitals, he said, there are 39 fewer deaths and 90 fewer patients with new heart failures compared with only six years ago.

The study, called the Global Registry of Acute Coronary Events, or GRACE, enrolled 44,372 patients at 113 hospitals from 1999 to 2006. All the patients had had a severe heart attack or suffered from acute coronary syndrome, which includes other types of heart attacks and a kind of chest pain called unstable angina.

Death rates from severe heart attacks while in the hospital were reduced to 4.5 percent at the end of the study from 8.4 percent at the beginning, according to the report.

The study was funded by the pharmaceutical company Sanofi-Aventis through an unrestricted educational grant to the University of Massachusetts to maintain the GRACE registry. Most of the authors have received funds from pharmaceutical companies.

Source : http://www.chicagotribune.com